An electrical device changes lives in Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room”

San Diego Repertory Theatre’s latest play centers on a revolutionary electrical appliance. That device is not, as you already might have surmised, a can opener.

Yet in a metaphorical sense, maybe there’s a connection; director Sam Woodhouse says Sarah Ruhl’s play is all about lifting the lid on some intimate yet all-important subjects.

“This is a play about love, sex, electricity, intimacy and marriage,” said Woodhouse, the Rep’s co-founder and artistic director. “I like to say it’s a comedy about love and sex for adults with open hearts and minds.”

The story behind “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” is based in historical fact. Its setting is Victorian-era America, a time when medical and psychological issues affecting women were frequently shunted under the catchall label “hysteria.”

In the play, Dr. Givings (Francis Gercke), a forward-thinking young gynecologist, uses a newly invented electrical device (an early version of the kind later described as a “marital aid”) to treat his female patients.

The not-so-unpleasant paroxysms that result arrive as a complete and revelatory surprise to those patients, since women just aren’t supposed to feel that kind of thing. The sounds coming from the next room also arouse the curiosity of the doctor’s somewhat neglected wife, Catherine (Aubrey Saverino), whose own investigations into the technique help transform the couple’s lives and marriage.

If it’s a bit hard to fathom that people would approach those matters in such a (literally) clinical way, Saverino said understanding the mindset of the time has taken work on the part of the cast as well.

“As we rehearse, we do have to keep reminding ourselves that what they’re experiencing in the room has no association with sex for them,” Saverino said, “or orgasms or being turned on or being aroused.

“We have to keep reminding ourselves that this is (thought of) as being sick and having a fever break. Over the course of the play, people do start to put the pieces together, and realize, ‘Oh, I want to kiss you when I have this feeling!’ But we (as actors) have to keep stripping our preconceived notions away.”

Speaking of stripping: While the play lays bare some very private subjects (and is recommended only for grown-ups), Saverino said it’s ultimately not meant to be an exercise in prurience.

“It’s sexy and it’s got the titillation factor and all that,” she said. “But I think at the heart of it, it’s also a love story in marriage. A sexual revolution in marriage.”

After premiering at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in early 2009, “In the Next Room” had a relatively brief run on Broadway, but earned three Tony nominations (including one for best play) and was named a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The Rep production, a San Diego premiere, is not the first Ruhl play to hit the theater: Woodhouse directed the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship winner’s play “The Clean House” in 2008. Ruhl’s other works include “Eurydice” (which Moxie Theatre staged last year) and “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.”

Woodhouse called himself “a giant fan of Sarah Ruhl’s, for many reasons. She loves to celebrate this heightened kind of theatricality, swimming in these magical moments of revelation that she has the audacity to put onstage.

“(And) she has kind of a daredevil approach to dramatic structure. One moment there’s something extraordinarily funny, and the next moment you’re crying. And then the next moment there’s some nutty event happening.”

His staging of “In the Next Room” brings together some top names in local theater circles. Saverino is a 2010 alum of the Old Globe Theatre/University of San Diego graduate theater program who made a splash in the Globe’s summer Shakespeare festivals, winning a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle award this year for her featured role in “King Lear.” (She returns to San Diego from New York for this show.)

Gercke is a co-founder of New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad and now an associate artistic director at Cygnet Theatre, where he has appeared in and helped direct numerous shows. The cast also includes San Diego favorites Monique Gaffney, Lisel Gorell-Getz, Brian Mackey and Dale Morris, along with the L.A.-based Willow Geer, a seasoned stage and screen performer (and granddaughter of the actor Will Geer).

To Gercke, one of the most compelling aspects of “In the Next Room” is the way the work’s sense of discovery encompasses both the sensual and scientific. In both realms, there’s an intimate interplay of fascination and apprehension.

“This is the dawn of the electrical age,” as Gercke says of the setting. “And it is much like the dawn of the nuclear age, or the Internet age. There were these incredibly quick advancements. Especially with electricity — it really was, and still is to some extent, a source of life as well as a source of danger.

“Just like splitting the atom. What Pandora’s box are you going to open up? What pleasures are you going to provide? And then what new questions (will arise) that you don’t necessarily know the answers to?”